Before that, her face and hands might have betrayed her—it only depended on the angle from which she must have been watched. But when Vogel came back, the smile with which she looked up to greet him was serene and artless.
He nodded.
'Please excuse me.'
The smile with which he answered her was perfunctory and preoccupied—he didn't even make the mistake of looking closely at her. He went straight across to a folding bureau built into the panelling on one side of the room, and pulled out a drawer.
'I don't want you to be alarmed,' he said in his cold even voice, 'but I should like you to stay here a few minutes longer.'
She felt the creep of her skin up towards the nape of her neck, and searched for the voice that had once been her own.
'I'm quite comfortable,' she said.
'I think you'd better stay,' he said, and turned round as he slipped the jacket of a big blued automatic in his hand. 'The stewards have seen someone prowling about the ship again, just like that mysterious person I told you about who was here last night. But this time he isn't going to get away so easily.'
3
Something as intangible as air and as vicious as a machinegun began hammering at the pit of Loretta's stomach. The cohort of ghostly dynamos sang in her ears again, blotting out her precarious instant of hard-won peace in a din that was twice as bad as anything before it. She felt the blood draining down from her head until only a dab of powder and the sea-tan on her skin were left to save her from ultimate disaster.
'Not really?' she said.
Her voice seemed to come from four or five miles away, a mere hollow echo of itself. She knew that by some miracle of will-power she had kept the smile steady on her face; but even that wasn't enough. The disaster was not dispelled—it was barely checked.
A queer glimpse of desperate humour was the only thing she could cling to. She, who had met case-hardened men on their own ground, who had faced death as often as dishonour, and with the same poised contempt and unfaltering alertness—she, Loretta Page, who was ranked at Ingerbeck's as the coolest head on a roster of frost-bitten intellects which operated in the perpetual bleakness of temperatures below zero—was being slowly and inevitably broken up. The rasps of a third degree more subtle and deadly than anything she had ever dreamed of were achieving what mere violence and crude terrorism could never have achieved. They were working away as implacably and untiringly as fate, turning her own self into her bitterest enemy.
Vogel's jet-black eyes were fixed on her now. They had moved on to her face like the poles of a magnet from which she would have had to struggle transparently to get away; and yet his aquiline features were still without positive expression.
'You've nothing to worry about,' he said, in a purr of caressing reassurance.
'But I'm thrilled.' She met his gaze unflinchingly, with the same smile of friendly innocence. 'What is it that makes you so popular?'
He shrugged.
'They're probably just some common harbour thieves who think the boat looks as if she might have some valuables on board. We shall find out.'
'Let me come with you.'
'My dear——'
'I'm not a bit frightened. Not while you've got that gun. And I'll be awfully quiet. But I couldn't bear to miss anything so exciting. Please—would you mind?'
He hesitated for a moment only, and then opened the door on the starboard side.
'All right. Will you keep behind me?'
He switched out the lights, and she followed him out on to the deck. Under the dim glow of the masthead light she caught sight of his broad back moving forward, and stepped after him. In the first shock of transition from the bright illumination of the wheelhouse there was no difference in quality between the blackness of the air and the sea, so that the night seemed to lie all around them, above
